Tag Archives: Agent Virtualization

(Excerpt from original post on the Taneja Group News Blog)

Imagine if all your heavyweight system management agents suddenly became super-stealthy and were no longer at risk of being caught directly deployed in a virtual machine. Imagine that all your agents across solutions could be managed, even orchestrated, from one console. And they no longer put their target machines at risk while getting their special kernel access missions on each vm accomplished safely and securely.

This sounds like a combination of cold war espionage, cyberpunk fiction, and remote drone warfare. But Intigua, coming out of semi-stealth mode today, is claiming that they will virtualize your whole set of system management agents including those for performance, security, and backup. A virtualized agent can then be executed on each target virtual machine without having to be installed on it. Because of their remote operational control, Intigua can orchestrate a set of agents to prevent agent overload or interference, and can throttle total agent utilization to prevent management overhead from impacting performance or availability.

Having worked in systems management for many years, I’ve had to install thousands of agents at some of the biggest Fortune 1000 production environments (once upon a time even by mounting a portable tape drive to each machine in turn…). Intigua’s single image agent management alone sounds like nirvana. When you factor in how it can be hard if not impossible to stage management agents in linked clones or golden vm images, that you can’t make use of app virtualization for system-level agents, and find software deployment solutions for complex agent processes difficult to script in a bullet-proof consistent way, the potential value of agent virtualization to large enterprises and cloud service providers grows significantly.

There are many more potential benefits to virtualized agents including ensuring better compliance, more fully automated provisioning, and painless agent updating. I’d be surprised if Intigua hasn’t already been noticed by one or more of the Big 4 systems management companies. “Systems management virtualization” could instantly revitalize some increasingly legacy management solution portfolios. If Intigua’s solution works as claimed, powerful full agents could make a real come-back against compromised agentless solutions.

Today at #snyc18 learning about the latest in #serverless. Opportunity is huge (iRobot is 100% serverless and loving it @ben11kehoe ), but not a panacea, lots of work to do to build up full production applications yet according to Kelsey Hightower (google) @kelseyhightower .